About This Issue

Abstract

Although the four peer-reviewed articles in this issue were selected on their merit and not from a proposed topic, taken as a whole, they do suggest a theme. On the broadest level, the articles point out that when thinking about and managing landscapes, one size does not fit all. Guidelines for public spaces, assumptions about environmental justice, models from new urbanism, and even “spatial imaginaries” (how we imagine our cities should be) do not always capture the complexity of our places and our perspectives on them. An understanding of different genders, different socioeconomic groups, and different ecological conditions can challenge our existing knowledge and shift design and management decisions. In these articles, these new understandings do not invalidate existing knowledge; they expand it, creating more nuanced and inclusive approaches to design, planning, and management. In “Separate but equal?,” Yiwei Huang and N. Claire Napawan explore how gender influences park use in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Through behavioral observation and on-site interviews, they document how the park design intersects with the demands of women’s daily lives; women with children or bags of groceries felt restricted to certain areas of the park. Huang and Napawan conclude that although gender segregation in park usage is often explained by differences in preferences, in this case, the park design created involuntary segregation as well. They argue that designers should be aware of how gender plays out in people’s daily lives to create more gender-inclusive designs. Isabel Shargo and a research team from the Community Engagement, Environmental Justice, and Health Laboratory at University of Maryland use GIS mapping to explore how two aspects of environmental justice—food access through urban farms and the location of toxic sites—relate to each other in Baltimore. Their findings show that although urban farms are primarily located in low-income communities of color, these farms are not usually in proximity to toxic sites. This is generally good news for people interested in improving food access through urban farming; however, the story is more nuanced. As they conclude, the “separation of toxic sites and urban farming was not by design but was an unintended result of discriminatory housing practices and gentrification trends.” Gavin Smith, Allison Anderson, and David Perkes question the “one-size-fits-all” approach of the new urbanist transect, especially when it is applied to coastal zones experiencing more frequent extreme weather events and sea level rise because of climate change. They propose a modification of the transect—a combination of the transect with a hazard overlay district that can incorporate a more adaptive and flexible approach to design regulations in coastal zones. In the final article of this issue, Cory Parker explores how people experiencing homelessness inhabit landscapes in three California cities. From behavior observation and on-site interviews, he develops a typology of three land uses: parks and public space, industrial areas, and transportation infrastructure. In each, different sites are preferred depending on the level of visibility desired by the person. Although unhoused people have to make do with leftover spaces, Parker describes how they exhibit agency in deciding which landscapes to inhabit throughout the day. He challenges designers and planners to consider the needs of people experiencing homelessness in their processes, perhaps leaving some space as informal and undesigned. Collectively, these articles challenge exclusionary practices in design and planning, whether it is intentional (such as the use of police and fencing to La nd sc ap e Jo ur na l 4 0 :1 IS SN 0 27 724 26 eIS SN 15 53 -2 70 4